Quotes from James Lee Burke

I had no plan in mind. However, that statement is one I have always distrusted in other people, and I distrust it even more when I think it or say it myself. The unconscious always knows what the person is doing or planning. The agenda is to find the situation and the rationale that will allow the individual to commit deeds that are unconscionable. No matter how you cut it, I was back to the short form of the Serenity Prayer, known in AA and other recovery groups as Fuck It.

I messed my pants," he said.

Most government employees aren't bad guys; they're just unimaginative, they feel comfortable in a world of predictable rules, and they rarely question authority. But if you run up against the nasty ones and they sense fear in you, they'll try to dismantle you one piece at a time.

No, I ain't wanted there, I don't like it there, I ain't coming in there . . . Good-bye.

I've killed men against whom I had no grievance.

I went to the bathroom in my pants. That's what you done, man.

This is a lovely car. You drive it and suddenly it's 1965. What a wonderful time that was, just before everything started to change," she said. "Who could argue, Lila?" I said. Unless you were black or spent '65 in Vietnam, I thought as they drove away.

No, I'm a coonass, my religion is shaky, and I've never hit the juice.

one of the basic tenets of A.A.—that there is no possession more valuable than a sober sunrise, and any drunk who demands more out of life than that will probably

No, I ain't. I'm shit and nails and all kinds of bad news.

Pray that liars aren't kept a long time in purgatory

As a young person on the edge of discovering the world and shaking away the scales of your youth, did you ever have a day when you knew that for the rest of your life, you would be grateful that your father was your father and your mother was your mother, no matter how flawed they might be?

So that's how to the dark tower I came.

But as William Faulkner said, and as I was about to learn, the past is not only still with us, the past is not even the past. The warning call from Wally

How do you live with it, family and friends ask. The answer is I don't. When you lose your kid, the best you can hope for is a scar rather than an open wound. I feel I'm in a house of mirrors, and I want to break every one of them.

I hit him so hard spittle and blood flew from his mouth onto a woman's blouse four feet away. I drove my fist into his kidney, a blow that made his back arch as though his spine had been broken, then I hooked him with a left below the eye and drove a right cross into his jaw that knocked him across a folding table.

The clouds were as yellow as sulfur and roiling in thick curds all the way to the horizon, as though we were trapped beneath an ocean that was sliding over the edges of the earth.

But every longtime cop will tell you that the criminals who scared him most were the ones who looked and talked like the rest of us and committed deeds that no one, absolutely no one, ever wants to have knowledge of.

Do you know why we drink? So we can do the things our conscience won't let us do when we're sober.

Unless you are familiar with the nature of Southern white trash, you will not understand the following: They are a genetically produced breed whose commonality is a state of mind and not related to the social class to which they belong. Economics has nothing to do with their origins or their behavior. You cannot change them. They glory in violence and cruelty and brag on their ignorance, and would have no problem manning the ovens at Auschwitz. That's not hyperbole.

This man is evil and I wish you hadn't gone after him on your own. But stop judging yourself so harshly. You were protecting a creature who can't protect himself. You don't think God can understand that?" I'm not a theologian, but I believe absolution can be granted to us in many forms. Perhaps it can come in the ends of a woman's fingers on your skin. Some people call it the redemptive power of love. Anyway, why argue with it when it comes your way?

As William Shakespeare said in Henry IV, "we owe God a death and let it go which way it will he that dies this year is quit for the next.

A wet cigarette butt clung to my cheek like a mashed cockroach. I could smell whiskey and beer in my clothes and Gable's blood on my knuckles and I swore I could taste whiskey surging out of my stomach into my throat, like an old friend who has come back in a time of need.

but there are certain truths you keep inside you and do not defend lest you cheapen and then lose them altogether. Those truths have less to do with the dead than the awareness that we are no different from them, and there is no afterlife but only one life, a continuum in which all time occurs at once, like a dream inside the mind of God.